By Mina Wiebe

In typical Courtney Love fashion, Hole’s 1994 album Live Through This flipped the alt-rock genre on its head, gave it the finger, and contributed to a total shift in the alternative music scene. I’ve always thought of the 90’s as a decade of metamorphosis for alternative music, and the album played a crucial role in the transformation. In the late 80’s there was certainly a spike in alternative music, but it wasn’t until the 90’s that these bands really took off. Alternative music was suddenly this paradoxical butterfly, bursting from its underground cocoon to become the very thing its essence was built to juxtapose: it became mainstream.

In her Pitchfork review of Live Through This Sasha Geffen made a good point when she explained that “[w]hile there were plenty of rock songs written by men about hounding and abusing women, there were few about being hounded and abused. The rock canon, like all the others, fiercely guarded its male subjectivity, and Love wanted to break through its ranks”. That’s why I have the utmost respect for Hole—while many other male alt-bands began to be accepted for what they already were, Hole had to go through an entire metamorphosis of sound to have their alternative music accepted into the mainstream world. And when they did finally push their way in to this male-dominated music scene, somehow their work was still attributed to the work of a man.

And although 90’s alt-music is usually associated with names like Nirvana and Pearl Jam, Hole definitely made its mark. Live Through This didn’t reach Billboard’s top 40, but it still met critical acclaim, going multi-platinum and earning top-100 chart spots in seven countries. Hole had successfully gained a mainstream audience, sporting the ironic “alternative” label while gaining international recognition. Live Through This is a staple of the decade, and will forever be known as one of the albums that helped change the meaning of alternative.